Using Checklists in eLearning… Challenge #148

It’s been a while since I’ve worked on one of Articulate E-Learning Heroes’ weekly challenges. This weekend I needed a break from work, but still wanted to play around with some eLearning development. I decided to take the challenge:

“This week, your challenge is to share an example that demonstrates how checklist interactions can be used in e-learning.” You can find the complete description here.

After looking at a few (very impressive and creative) demos already posted, I started thinking about another way to use checklists. One of my children is in kindergarten, so right now we are working our way through a stack of flashcards with her sight-reading words. I remember stacks of flashcards in my own life most recently from my days as a student of Portuguese – as well as observing my students use them to learn vocabulary when I taught beginning Spanish.

Instead of flashcards, I’d use a checklist for vocabulary in my demo.

I opted to make two vocabulary lists based off background images: one, a nature scene, and the other, an overhead view of a city. In addition to using Storyline 2, I’ve also been playing around with incorporating VideoScribe into eLearning, so I used an SVG file for the first that could be “drawn” onto the page for a fun effect. Adding in the checklists came next, along with drawing hotspots that would trigger layers with text and audio when the pictures were clicked.

After recording the audio, I published the demo and tried it on my laptop. It worked well. I then tried it on my iPhone and… oh no! The video was the problem. iPhones want to bring video to full screen rather than allowing inline playback (a problem that may be resolvable with Safari 10 in a way that it hasn’t been before – more information here). That caused strange things to happen with the nature vocabulary list, because I built the rest of the slide on top of the video. As a partial solution, I placed the video on a separate slide then faded in a still capture of the image on the slide with the interaction. It still doesn’t play seamlessly on an iPhone the way it does on a laptop, but the learner is able to view and complete the interaction.